


Maybe We Can't Be Okay (But Maybe We're Tough And We'll Try Anyway)

by biextroverts



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Parenthood, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-01
Updated: 2018-06-01
Packaged: 2019-05-16 09:35:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14808786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/biextroverts/pseuds/biextroverts
Summary: Emori and Murphy worry that they may be too much like their parents to successfully raise a child of their own.





	Maybe We Can't Be Okay (But Maybe We're Tough And We'll Try Anyway)

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Memori Appreciation Week Day 5: Kidfic.
> 
> Title is from "Maybe (Next to Normal)" from Next to Normal.
> 
> While we were talking about Memori Appreciation Week late last week, @mehmori commented to me that "as much as [she loved] memori as parents, [she'd] always sort of pegged emori as someone who wouldn't want kids." This headcanon, as well as @mehmori's reasoning behind it - Emori would likely be scared of passing on her disability, and isn't an overly affectionate person besides - spurred me to approach kidfic day from the angle that I did in this piece.
> 
> Huge thanks to both @palbuddypoe and @mehmori for beta reading, and to @mehmori for allowing me to bounce ideas for the third and final section of this story off of her until one of them finally stuck.

* * *

          It’s not until the baby begins kicking about five months in that Emori starts to wonder if this was really such a good idea. She hadn’t had a strong opinion on it either way when John had suggested they try for a child, but he’d been so hopeful, eyes shining with desire to be a father, to give back to the world in the form of the next generation, and they both were fond of the Griffin-Blakes’ strong-willed daughter and eerily cerebral son; Emori had even thought occasionally, watching Madi and Wells play with action figures on the living room floor as she talked with Bellamy and John with Clarke, that it might be nice to someday have children of their own. His desire had easily ignited hers. But as much as she’d known, abstractly, what the pair of lines on the pregnancy test, the slight but distinct swelling of her belly, had meant, that abstract knowledge is nothing compared to the feeling of her child moving inside of her. They could get an ultrasound now, if they wanted to – Clarke has called several times already, and John has asked her if she’s interested, reminded her gently that they can get one and opt not to learn the gender, as if the genitals are the portion of their unborn child that might be cause for concern. He’s a love-blind idiot, of course; he misses the looks people give her, and they don’t say anything out loud when he’s around, but Emori has lived with her hand for thirty-six years and knows the slights she has endured because of it, the slights she can’t begin to bear imagining being inflicted on her child. She thinks she might cry with joy to see the deep brown of her eyes, the slight cleft of her chin, reflected in the infant when it is born (alongside John’s prominent nose, of course, his narrow mouth) – anything but the twisted hand that has been the cause of so much strife. To live with herself, after giving the child that – she’s not sure how she would go about it.  
  
          And then there is the matter of after the child is born, whether or not it has too many fingers of all the wrong lengths. Emori has always been sparing with her love, and especially with the love she is willing to express – only Otan, John, Raven have ever heard the words “I love you” cross her lips – and the question gnaws at her: what if she cannot find it in herself to love this tiny person growing in her womb? She knows what not being loved can do to a child, remembers her own parents, the clarity of the first time she realized they cared nothing for her – everyone else’s mother and father had come to see their progeny perform in the kindergarten play, to watch them play The Grapes in _The Fox and the Grapes_ or Sheep Number Three in _The Boy Who Cried Wolf_. She had been The Tortoise in _The Tortoise and the Hare_ , one of the biggest and best roles in the entire series of sketches, and, when she’d asked her parents at home later that night why they hadn’t come, her mother hadn’t even looked at her as she’d made her reply. “Why should we take time out from our days simply to claim a little freak as our own? We feed you, we clothe you – isn’t that enough? If your father had had his way, you’d be dead in the streets by now.” Emori had run to Otan, cried in his arms – they had left their parents when she was seven, as soon as Otan had turned eighteen, and she’s tried not to think of them since. She thinks of them now, though, and she sees more of herself than she’d like in the passionless set of her father’s face, the hard-edged apathy of her mother’s voice (theirs, she assumes, both by nature and by bitterness towards their progeny; hers only after passion and empathy proved ill-suited to her continued survival in this world). She is not one to abandon on the basis of a societally-perceived defect, as her parents did her brother and herself, but, for as long as she has condemned those who fail to love their children, she has no proof she won’t be one of them, no proof she won’t let this infant (and John, bless him, already overflowing with fatherly love and devotion, already reading to and playing music for Emori’s belly because he read somewhere it was good for the growing child) down.  
  
          “I’m sorry,” she murmurs to her belly one night. John lies asleep beside her, one arm draped across her pillow; normally, he’d wrap it loosely around her waist, but she can’t seem to find slumber tonight. She feels ill – not the morning sickness of months three and four, but something that sticks deeper in her gut. She cradles her swollen abdomen. “I’m sorry I’m bringing you into this world when you might end up like me, or worse, I might end up like my parents. I promise I’ll try not to; I promise it’s never been my wish to give you anything less than the life you deserve. I just worry that’s what might happen. You’re allowed to resent me for it if you want, I just – want you to know.”  
  
          “Hunh?”  
  
          Emori looks over; John has woken, and gazes at her blearily. She quickly arranges her features into a smile – probably not her most convincing work, but they’re both tired.

          “Were you talking to someone, ‘Mori?” John asks, concern bleeding into the hoarseness of disrupted sleep.

          “Just the baby,” Emori says. “I like to talk to it sometimes, when I can’t sleep.” The best lies aren’t lies at all – only evasions.

          “Oh. Okay.” John takes her left hand in both of his, massages the knuckles. “Try to get some rest, all right? You both need it.”

          “I will,” Emori promises. John’s head falls back to his pillow, and within a minute he’s snoring again. Emori envies the ease with which he’s adjusted to this new reality of theirs.

          “Let’s get some rest, little one,” she murmurs, curling onto her left side, lifting John’s arm and placing it across her hip. She may let them down someday, despite all her best intentions, but she does not have to do it yet.

  
***

          The first time Murphy feels their child move in Emori’s belly, something in him freezes and shatters – the rose-tinted glasses, he thinks, with which he’s been viewing the situation since Emori’s test came back positive, because it is suddenly painfully clear to him that they really didn’t think this through. He’s always thought his having children is what Alex Murphy would have wanted – to see Murphy pass on everything Alex had taught him, to bounce a grandchild on his knee, singing “Bingo Was His Name-O –” and he wants them for himself, too, in order to pass on his father’s legacy as well as because there is something about new life, second chances, that the idealist in him he hasn’t yet managed to crush entirely just loves. And in the world outside of his head, of his notions of filial _whatever_ , he and Emori both have a certain fondness for the Griffin-Blake children – Madi, as sharp-tongued as either of her parents at their worst, and Wells, almost inhumanly even-tempered for a boy of four years old, an honest-to-god caricature of his namesake. When he’d suggested to Emori that they have children of their own, she’d been a little bemused – she hadn’t been considering it herself – but had come easily to agree with him. She’d purchased a pregnancy test the next day, taken it, received a negative, read online that it usually took at least two weeks to obtain accurate results, and chomped at the bit for that fourteenth day when she could finally take it again. She still glows with the promise of motherhood, which, as fiercely protective as she is, he is sure she will take to like a fish to water, but he has started to doubt if he is really suited to fatherhood after all.

          There are a lot of things Murphy would change about himself to make himself a better father, if he could: he swears too much, he fucked up badly in his early twenties in ways that have permanently docked his earning potential (AKA, gone on his criminal record) … but the thing he most fears will let Emori and their child down is what Raven once called his “tendency to blow a good thing.” “Years of shit, only some of it self-inflicted, has made you scared as hell of getting what you want,” Raven had told him over coffee during those agonizing four months he’d been broken up with Emori six years back. “You screw it up because you think otherwise you’ll lose it, and at least this way you’ve got some control over the whole thing. It’s a ‘you can’t fire me, I quit’ kind of deal, you know? If only you played poker that way; you’d fold when you had a straight flush and my quads would win.” He’d rolled his eyes at her then, called her mercenary for the poker comment and a meddling bitch for the rest (although he’d asked her to meet him at the Mothership Cafe, desperate to know how he could win Emori back), but she’d been … well, she hadn’t been wrong. And there’s nothing better than this, nothing better than coming home to Emori eating Funyuns dipped in ketchup and whipped cream because “it’s what the baby wants,” than tossing possible names back and forth, trying to out-ridiculous each other (they already know what they’ll really name the baby: Sonia for a girl, Alexander, after his father, for a boy), than shopping together for maternity clothes and commenting scathingly on how ugly they all are (Emori, of course, looks radiant even in the stretchy solid colors that would look hideous on anyone else). There’s nothing better than this, and so there’s nothing, of course, that he’s more likely to fuck up fantastically. He doesn’t know if he’ll go like his father, whose love made him reckless, or his mother, whose love made her bitter (he hated her, he still hates her, but if anything happens to Emori, hell, he’ll lose himself in the bottle too), or in some totally new way unique to his incredible predisposition towards disappointing the people who matter.

          “I can’t do it,” he tells Mbege’s grave when he visits – Mbege would laugh at him if he were really here, call him a sentimental dumbass, but Mbege has been dead for nearly twelve years now, so Murphy can transmute the friend he thought he needed at the age of twenty into the kind that he needs now without feeling too much discomfort over the appropriation of Mbege’s image. “I can’t give them what they deserve, man. I can’t _be_ what they deserve. If I leave now, I’m just another deadbeat dad; if I stay, I’ll fuck it up in some other way down the line. I should never have suggested we have kids; hell, I should never have kissed her that first time, tricked her somehow into being with me, I –”

          “You what?” Emori asks, coming up behind Murphy and laying her chin on his shoulder, wrapping her arms around his waist.

          He doesn’t have time to come up with a convincing lie, so he just says “I love you,” turning to wrap her in his arms as well.

          Emori quirks an eyebrow at him. “Smart choice,” she says. “I love you, too.”

          “I’m sorry,” Murphy says, and Emori laughs and pecks him on the nose. He doesn’t have the heart, or maybe it’s the guts, to tell her that he really is.

***

          The moment Clarke leaves the examination room to go review the ultrasound images, Murphy crosses from his chair to help Emori down from the table and into a seat of her own. She’s gnawed her lip into a bloody mess, and she trembles slightly on her feet like she’s coming out of a sedated state. Murphy understands her discombobulation at this concrete step in the process of her pregnancy; he himself feels as off-kilter as she looks, stomach swirling with nausea like a black hole coming to consume him from the inside out. When Emori collapses in her chair, he does, too, and looks up from blinking back hot tears of turbulent self-hatred (what has he done, getting her pregnant; no one deserves his DNA, deserves him as a father) only when he hears shallow, shuddering breaths beside him – Emori, quiet tears of her own trailing down her cheeks and an expression like she’s just had the most horrific  revelation of her life painted across her face.

          “Are you okay?” he manages, though his voice sounds tight with his attempt to keep from crying, and there’s another thing to hate himself for, that he’d rather avoid expressing his emotions than free his tone to comfort his teary-eyed and visibly shaken wife. When Emori looks over at him, though, her face falls still further at the sight of his, creased and red with barely-contained panic.

          “Are you, John?”

          A wave of guilt crashes over him at the fact that she’s crying and still comforting him, and he leans his head back against the wall, tears spilling out and falling across his ears with the angle of his neck. “Fuck,” he says, and then “I don’t … no. God, I don’t deserve you, Emori. Or this kid. God knows this kid doesn’t deserve me.”

          “John...” The name is too raw, too close to his idyllic early childhood, for most people to let it cross their lips, but Emori is allowed to tug at his heartstrings in that way. “Oh, John.” And then a bitter laugh, dry and hollow, a startling contrast to the teary wetness of her voice. “I’m the one cheating you and the child out of what you deserve.”

          He turns to her, lays a hand on her shoulder. “In what world, Emori? You’re not the ex-con whose only talent is blowing a good thing.”

          “You’re not the mutant potentially incapable of providing a child with a parent’s love.”

          “‘Mori, what?”

          He thought that tearful voice was her broken one, but now it really cracks. “I don’t know if I have it in me to love another person, John,” she says, staring straight ahead even as he wills her to look at him, to meet his eyes. “Maybe three’s all I had left in me after my life drained whatever other love I might have had away. Who knows? Our child doesn’t deserve a mother who might not be able to love them; you don’t deserve a wife who might not be able to love your child.”

          He doesn’t know how to respond to that; he’s certain Emori will love their child with all her characteristic ferocity, but even he realizes it would sound stupid simply to say so. Instead, he responds in his way: a joke, devolving slowly into a puddle of self-pity. “Well, I already knew I didn’t deserve you; I just figured, so long as you decided to take pity on me and pretend I did, I’d go along with it. I’m not a good enough guy to leave because I’m not a good enough guy for you. My reason for leaving will be something way dumber, trust me.”

          Emori fixes him with something he might almost describe as a glare. “Are you planning on leaving?” she asks.

          “No! Shit, no. I’m just only really good at disappointment.”

          Emori frowns. “Where’s the evidence for that, John? You’ve only disappointed me the once, and you came back from that admirably; you finished your Bachelor’s, got that marginally better job, won _me_ again, which I can promise you wasn’t a given.” Her voice has steadied, but tears still glisten on her cheeks and in her eyes.

          “What evidence is there you won’t be able to love our kid? You’ve never not loved someone you wanted to love in all the years I’ve known you. Hell, you’ve never not done anything you wanted to do, ‘Mori.”

          “Liar.” She’s fond, though, now, and almost warm.

          “I just mean you can do anything you want.”

          “See, you’re a natural at parenting. _You can be anything you want to be, Emori, so long as you set your mind to it._  You sound like Bellamy. _”_

          Murphy pulls a face, and Emori laughs. “Tell you what,” she says, “I’ll try to believe I’m capable of a mother’s love if you try to believe you’re capable of meeting, hell, even _exceeding_ , people’s expectations. No promises I’ll manage, but …”

          “No promises I’ll manage, either,” Murphy says. Emori smiles at him through a sheen of half-shed tears, and his eyes are stinging, too, but he manages a question, a cocky grin, nonetheless – he’s not willing to give up the whole of his brand, even if he’ll try to work on the self-loathing. “Seal it with a kiss?”

          “You just want an excuse,” Emori says, laughing. He shrugs, leans over and puts his hands on her drying cheeks and kisses her. Her hands find his shoulder blades. It’s an awkward angle, between the swell of Emori’s lower torso and the hard metal arms of the chairs, but they make it work. And it makes sense, that they do. They’ve always been survivors, have taken on and overcome everything the world has thrown at them yet; somehow, they’ll make it all work.

**Author's Note:**

> Gods need prayer badly and all that; please comment if you liked, hated, or felt any sort of way at all.


End file.
